Relate North: Art & design for education and sustainability

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This book brings together the work of researchers, scholars and artists whose professional activity centres on the fi elds of contemporary arts, design, art education and sustainability. In general, the Relate North series helps advance our understanding of art and design education, particularly among people living in Northern and Arctic areas. This particular volume, the fi fth in the series, focuses on the inter-relationship of art, design and education for sustainability. Contributing authors provide fascinating ac- counts of current research and praxis in several northern countries including Canada, Finnish Lapland, Scotland and Sweden.

Art and Design Education for Sustainability will be of interest to a cross sec- tion of the art and design education research community which may include, for example, art and cultural historians, sociologists, artists, designers, art educators and practice-based researchers. In addition, the book will be of use to undergraduate art and art education students, postgraduate students in the arts and policy makers concerned with northern issues relat- ing to art, design, education and sustainability.

www.ulapland.fi /LUP

RELATE NORTH

:

Art and Design Education for SustainabilityEdited by Timo Jokela & Glen Coutts

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Relate North

Art & Design for

Education and Sustainability

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Edited by Timo Jokela & Glen Coutts

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“The peer-review label is a trademark registered by the Federa- tion of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV). The label will indicate that the peer-review of articles and books has been performed in line with the quality and ethical criteria imposed by the academic community”.

Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. (2015). Label for peer-reviewed scholarly publications: Require- ments for use. Retrieved from https://www.tsv.fi/en/

services/label-for-peer-reviewed-scholarly-publications/

requirements-for-use

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PO Box 8123 FI-96101 Rovaniemi Tel +358 40 821 4242 publications@ulapland.fi www.ulapland.fi/lup

ISBN 978-952-310-928-5 (pdf)

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Preface

Timo Jokela

& Glen Coutts

University of Lapland, Finland

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T

he book you are now reading is the fifth in the Relate North series. As in previous volumes, the contents reflect the range of research and practice that is going in art and design in northern and Arctic countries. The title of the book was also the theme of a symposium and exhibition that took place in Rovaniemi, Finnish Lapland, in November 2017. The question of how the interconnected topics of education and sustainability might be addressed through research in art and design formed the basis of a call for papers for that conference. From a large number of submissions, papers and artworks were selected by the academic steering group. The events were attended by delegates from 12 countries around the circumpolar north and beyond.

At the closing of the symposium, we issued a call for contributions to the delegates and circulated the call widely. Selection was a two- stage process, potential authors were invited to submit a short synopsis and a subsequent selection invited to submit a full chapter or visual essay. We received many more proposals than it was possible to publish in one volume, and our task of selecting what we thought the most interesting proposals was not easy. Each contribution was then subjected to double blind peer-review.

This book is the result of that process. We are indebted to the authors, reviewers and the staff at the University of Lapland Press for making this publication possible.

At the closing of the symposium, we issued a call for contributions to the delegates and circulated the call widely. Selection was a two- stage

process, potential authors were invited to submit a short synopsis and a subsequent selection invited to submit a full chapter or visual essay. We received many more proposals than it was possible to publish in one volume, and our task of selecting what we thought the most interesting proposals was not easy. Each contribution was then subjected to double blind peer-review. This book is the result of that process. We are indebted to the authors, reviewers and the staff at the Lapland University Press for making this publication possible.

In 2014, the first book in this series was published: Relate North: Engagement, Art and Repre- sentation. Since then, the series has remained dedi- cated to the identification and sharing of contemporary practices in arts-based research and academic knowledge exchange in the fields of arts, design and art education. Each volume has consisted of scientific peer-reviewed chapters and visual essays.

The Relate North series has now included writing by academic researchers, artists, designers, art educators and practice-based researchers.

Contributions were sought that concerned issues surrounding art and design for education and sustainability. In addition, the general themes of Northern and Arctic perspectives on art and design; potential benefits to education for sustainability of art and design practice;

context-sensitive research methods and arts, crafts & design practices. Further, we hoped that our contributors would interrogate the complex relationship between education, sustainability, design and contemporary visual arts. We were not disappointed.

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The Relate North books (Jokela & Coutts, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017) have as an underlying phil- osophical standpoint, a focus on Northern and Arctic issues in the field of arts, design and visual culture. The series aims to advance understanding and seek to improve arts, design and visual culture education particularly amongst people living in Northern and Arctic areas. An additional aim is to introduce original ways of rethinking the status of contemporary arts, design, craft and new practices in art education in a Northern and Arctic context.

This volume continues in that tradition with five chapters and a visual essay.

As one might expect in a book entitled ‘Art and Design for Education and Sustainability’ many of the contributions focus on sustainability issues and how art, design and education might have roles to play in addressing the multitude of issues related to sustainability. The United Nations Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (UNESCO, 2015) identified 17 goals that need to be tackled, one of which, SDG4, is quality education. We believe that the contents of this volume offer a good insight to some of the ways that researchers, artists and academics are confronting the difficult issues raised by the sustainability agenda, from work in the studio to art-based projects in the field. Diverse in nature, the chapters range from critical analysis to personal reflection, but all are thought provoking.

In the opening chapter, Blair writes about the work of the Scottish artist, Will Maclean. She presents an analysis of two of Maclean’s works, one an exhibition based on the ‘ring net’ fishing system and the other a piece of public art that

references the ‘Highland Clearances’¹. In her essay Blair reveals the multifaceted nature of the artist’s work, his rigorous research and precision, together with the way his work is inextricably tied to people and place.

Precision is also a key element in design issues, and the next chapter outlines ways in which sustainable ‘human-centric’ processes might be developed in an Arctic Design method- ology. Häkkilä and Johansson take as their focus two exhibitions at Milan Design Week to illus- trate the design model they propose. The fragile and beautiful Arctic environment is an integral element of the design process, product creation and testing.

The third chapter focuses more directly on education, in this case early childhood and compulsory school education. Häikiö argues that sustainable education is now one of the ‘over- arching goals in the curriculum for early childhood education and for compulsory school in Finland as well as in Sweden’. In particular, the author discusses wider issues such as the ways that ‘cultural activities’ can be used to facilitate the discussion of sustainability issues.

In a deeply personal and reflective account of the long tradition of making wooden spoons around the campfire, Stöckell touches on major issues of the significance of handcraft, tradition, making and sharing. The impact of such activities combined with the potential of physical exercise (hiking) and working in the natural environment on wellbeing are threads running through the author’s contemporary artwork.

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The closing chapter explores the notion of the Arctic region as a ‘laboratory’ for testing the role that art and design might play in promoting aspects of sustainability. Jokela and Coutts ponder the interrelationship of art, design and education.

The authors discuss the Arctic environment as a ‘testing ground, or ‘laboratory’’ for specially devised art and design methods, the potential of art education for sustainability and posit the idea of a new genre of art and design education.

The closing contribution to the book is a visual essay, from a Canadian artist who discuses a portfolio of work that drew on the notion of getting lost. Her work has its origins in knowledge she gained from a series of interviews with people who are navigators. Hein’s work is about getting lost, as she writes ‘I found myself in unexpected moments where the places I know suddenly became unfamiliar’.

Editing a book is a team effort and, as editors, we have been extremely fortunate to have the support of a remarkable group of people, without whom none of the books in the series would have been possible. We therefore want to express our sincere thanks to the authors, artists, designers. Our thanks are also due to the academic reviewers and the Board of Lapland University Press. Special debts of gratitude go due to our designer Anna-Mari Nukarinen and to Anne Koivula of the Lapland University Press. In both cases, their patient profes- sionalism has been very much appreciated.

Timo Jokela and Glen Coutts Rovaniemi, November 2018

References

Jokela, T., & Coutts, G. (Eds.). (2014). Relate North 2014:

Engagement, art and representation. Rovaniemi:

Lapland University Press.

Jokela, T., & Coutts, G. (Eds.). (2015). Relate North: Art, heritage & identity. Rovaniemi: Lapland University Press.

Jokela, T., & Coutts, G. (Eds.). (2016). Relate North:

Culture, community and communication. Rovaniemi:

Lapland University Press.

Jokela, T., & Coutts, G. (Eds.). (2017). Relate North:

Practising place, heritage, art & design for creative communities. Rovaniemi: Lapland University Press.

UNESCO (2015). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Retrieved from

https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/

transformingourworld

Endnote

1 The Highland Clearances were forced evictions of people from the highlands and western islands of Scotland that took place during the mid 18th to mid- 19th centuries. During that period, the people were

’cleared’ from the land, principally to make way for the introduction of sheep farming.

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Lindsay Blair

University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland, UK

Reconfiguring the Historical Ontologies

of Northern Communities in the Art of

Will Maclean

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he poet W. B. Yeats wrote of the source of inspiration, of the point at which he discovered his direction, of that which clarified all that was to become most important to him:

It was through the old Fenian John O’Leary I found my theme. He gave me the poems of Thomas Davis, said they were not good poetry but had changed his life . . . I saw even more clearly than O’Leary that they were not good poetry . . . but they had one quality I admired and admire: they were not separate individual men; they spoke or tried to speak out of a people to a people; behind them stretched the genera- tions. (Yeats, 1970[1966], pp. 15–16)

It was his famous first meeting with Yeats that turned J.M. Synge into a legend of the Irish Literary Revival. Encountering the somewhat younger writer in Paris in December 1896, Yeats claims to have given him crucial advice on his career:

“Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine . . . Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a

life that has never found expression” (Yeats, 1968, p. 63).

In his essay ‘Old Songs and New Poetry’ Sorley MacLean writes:

A few months ago my brother John, who is as well qualified to give an opinion as anyone I know, said that the greatest of all Scottish works of art is Cumha na Cloinne, the ‘Lament for the Children’, attributed by the tradition of pipers to Patrick Mòr MacCrimmon and therefore of the 17th century. I hardly demurred, but suggested that if it is not Cumha na Cloinne or some other one of the great pibrochs, it is one of those Gaelic songs of the two and a half centuries between 1550 and 1800 – the songs in which ineffable melodies rise like exhalations from the rhythms and resonances of the words, the songs that alone make the thought that the Gaelic language is going to die so intolerable to anyone who knows Gaelic and has in the least degree the sensibility that responds to the marriage, or rather the simultaneous creation, of words and music. (MacLean, 1985, pp. 106–119)

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In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Will Maclean: Collected Works 1970–2010, there is a transcript of Maclean’s conversation with fellow artist, Sandy Moffat. Moffat asks Maclean to speak about his own relationship with the past:

As I said earlier my father did pass on to me a knowledge and a passion for the culture. As you rightly say ‘part of one’s own flesh and blood.’

The transcription of ideas – it is a huge question. I suppose it is the sum of parts that include – the collections of the Highland folklorists, J.F. Campbell, R.C. Maclaglan and Alexander Carmichael, the poetry of MacLean, George Campbell Hay and Angus Martin, the painting of Giorgio De Chirico, William McTaggart, Anselm Kiefer, and the sculpture of Joseph Cornell, Fred Stiven and H.C. Westermann. Then the ‘art of the sailor’ and the people of the seaboard tribes. Alexander Mackenzie’s History of the Highland Clearances (a book my father said should always be, with the bible, at my bedside) Donald Macleod’s Gloomy Memories and later James Hunter’s Making of the Crofting Community. Then the landscape itself. In Skye, Dun Caan, Camus Mallaig, and Suisnish and in Coigach, Stac Pollaigh, Badentarbert and Achnahaird. (Maclean, 2011, p. 57)

We are struck first by the way Yeats insists on the primacy of the loss of individuality – the sense that the artist speaks for a people, not for himself. His advice to Synge that he became participant observer amongst a marginalised community on the West of Ireland directly parallels his own sense of self-discovery. The same notion concerning the incomparable value of the oral tradition as preserved on the edges of the modern world is expressed in Sorley MacLean’s account of the Gaelic songs of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. MacLean’s regard for the tradition cannot be separated from his own development as the foremost Modernist Gaelic writer of the twentieth century. Will Maclean’s litany of influences includes international Modernists and Postmodernists but it is predominantly ‘of the folk’. It is primarily testament to his determination to speak for a people rather than for himself. His statement reveals a sense of the

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many voices, the marginalised voices, the subjugated voices; a sense, above all, of ‘heteroglossia’. The sense of the carrying stream: the voice of the people, the

‘mutations from below’, as Foucault would have it, is allied with a conviction that there are truths there just below the surface awaiting unearthing (Foucault, 1986[1970], p. 290). What we could say is, also, that all of the testimonies above

bear the marks of a Utopian Structuralism – a belief that there are systems which operate like linguistic structures enabling us to understand reality. Yeats, Synge and MacLean (S) all convey a regard for a folk culture which Russian formalists like Vladimir Propp and Roman Jakobson had used as a paradigm for his Structuralist principles. Maclean (W) identifies the Highland folklorists, Campbell and Carmichael, first of all in his list of influences. As the Eurocentric development of Modernism with its urban core has become more and more a contested area for debate, the peripheral areas with their strong interfusions with folk cultures are becoming a new area of focus once again. The notion of ‘alternative Modernisms’ lacks the political thrust necessary to impact on cultural hegemonies. However, we can now consider the concept of a singular Modernism that is experienced in fragmented and diverse ways across wide geographical and historical spaces according to the very uneven distribution of cultural or symbolic capital. This allows for the study of comparative aesthetics across a range of peripheral and semi-peripheral Modernities (such as developed in advanced cultures which are regarded as marginal in the context of European Modernism: the Scandinavian countries, the devolved British Isles and most of Eastern Europe). The social and political forces which brought these semi- peripheral Modernities into being have become, in the light of Reception Theo- ries, New Historicism and the rise of Anthropology, resistant to the totalising theories (of Urbancentic Modernism or Postcolonial paradigms for example) and are presently undergoing focused, comparative research (Collective, 2018).

The sense of many voices – of ‘hybridity’, of ‘heteroglossia’ and of the

‘intertextual’ – this sense which is now inextricably linked with the Postcolo- nial began with the Russian linguist and theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975).

These terms can too easily lose any sense of ‘apparency’ (Martin G. D., 1975, pp.

167–201), becoming little more than vapid ciphers, but Maclean’s commitment

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to these principles has been there since his earliest research into the herring fishing communities associated with the Ring-Net in the 1970s. This was long before Bakhtin’s terminology became part of the cultural discourse. Bakhtin’s terms were developed in relation to his theoretical treatise on the novel but they are clearly apposite to Maclean. If we take the term ‘intertextuality’, we need to regard it as something more than a formal, framing device in Maclean: there are the formal elements connecting his work to Surrealism or, more generally, to bricolage but it is an ‘intertextuality’ of a different order which characterises his art, overall. The place/work/folk nexus of Patrick Geddes describes most accurately the nature of Maclean’s ‘intertextual’ explorations. The material substance of much of his work especially in the early years had an original functional mode of existence within the crofting/fishing/whaling/seafaring industries which remain the inspiration for his work to this day. There may be found references to aspects of history, especially of Highland history, aspects of industry, especially fishing and whaling, and to voyages of exploration. We find within his installa- tions and box construction bits and pieces of all kinds of tools and implements that were commonly used within subsistence cultures.

Maclean gives a voice, or more accurately, voices to a range of communities which did not have a voice or whose voices were subjugated by powerful hege- monic interests of profit or control; they could be crofters cleared from the land, people stripped of their language, or people tied to industries such as fishing or whaling which are now residual in a society driven by the demands of late Capi- talism. For Bakhtin, the novel was the form which best represented the disparate voices which were not assimilated within an assertive authorial narrative, but the novel as represented by Bakhtin’s favoured novelist, Dostoevsky, is now almost unrecognisable; it has come increasingly to be regarded as the expression of originality or individuality. Maclean’s work represents the dialogical in several different ways: he can be connected with the anthropological in his role as creative participant observer, to socially engaged art practice especially in the series of cairns which he was invited to design on the Island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and then, more generally, as a vital component in the Postmodernist project to resist the ‘grand narrative’ (Sim, 2001, pp. 7–11). The ‘grand narrative’

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could be political/nationalist or social or cultural aesthetic but Maclean’s complex layering of meaning within an increasingly complex set of signifiers ensures that no easy alignment with any movement may be comfortably assigned to him.

While Postmodernist ‘intertextuality’ may be associated with the ‘appropriation’

works of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Coons or Peter Halley as parody or pastiche, this is an ‘intertextuality’ utterly alien to Maclean. Maclean’s purpose in his ‘appropriation’ of 19^th century Highland artist William McTaggart’s The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship (1895) image in The Emigrant Ship (1992) for example, could appear initially as an act of Postmodernist sabotage, but it is, in effect, more of an act of salvage – the salvage of the work from its place within an earlier Victorian

‘grand narrative’ including the marine art tradition.

Figure 1. The Emigrant Ship; mixed media on board with slate and wood (1992).

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There is not a trace of satire as Maclean ‘appropriates’ material from his High- land heritage – pieces of crofting or fishing detritus of old postcards, pamphlets, posters, cuttings from journals which bear witness to a world of cultural memory which the artist refuses to relinquish. Any reading of his work – the ambiguity of the symbolism, the juxtaposition of the elements, the extensive manipulation of the metonymic fragment – demands the active participation of the viewer in order to produce a meaning. That meaning, because of the presence within the work of dissonant elements, will necessarily be contingent rather than absolute, will be dependent on the viewer’s willingness to probe beneath the ‘aura’ of the works themselves to the palimpsest beyond. One example here might be the use of the sheep’s skull in the box constructions which represent Maclean’s sombre reflections upon the Highland Clearances:

When sheep replaced people on the land, the displaced population had to turn to the sea for their livelihood; sheep skulls invoke this displacement. Such experience finds a very individual expression through a wide range of sources, mostly in folk and non-European, such as Egyptian, Eskimo and American Indian Art. Such sources were discovered by the Surrealists, whose famous map of the world questioned European cultural arrogance. (Woods, 1987, pp. 6–7)

There are, however, other analogical elements within the boxes – not so much the metonymic as in the sheep’s skull but the forms of tools and totems which inter- connect the Northern cultures. Barbara Maria Stafford in her remarks about the curiosity cabinets in Renaissance times summarises concisely this analogical urge:

I believe these curiosity cabinets embody with great power and clarity the central idea of the analogical world view, namely, that all physical phenomena, from fallen stars, to Florentine stones, to magnified fleas, to the most skillfully chased silver goblets, can be cross-referenced, linked in reconciling explanation by the informed imagination.

(Stafford, 2001, p. 169)

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One of the features of Maclean’s art which makes re-readings so profitable is the way that he finds unexpected analogous relationships between formal elements:

the metonymic fragment – part of the stern sheet of a boat for example may figure as synecdoche on the one hand but within the same image the waterline may represent a metaphorical horizon and the same process occurs over and over in his reliquary boxes as the modest implements of the fishing culture become imbued with the sacred.

Felicia Hughes-Freeland takes the idea of tradition as found in the well- known essay ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ (1946[1920]) by T.S. Eliot and links Eliot’s articulation of creativity with anthropology. One of the key concerns she identifies in the essay is “the centrality of innovation to artistic production” which she says “raises questions about texts and genres” (Hughes- Freeland, 2007, p. 209). A new work changes the whole of the existing order:

“the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot, ‘Tradition and the individual talent’, 1970[1966], p. 62). “Tradi- tion is not a constraining factor but an enabling one, which is transformed even as it is built upon in time” (Hughes-Freeland, 2007, p. 209). I do think that the anthropological perspective is absolutely pertinent to Maclean – his work is genuinely collaborative and collectivist and exemplifies many of the elements highlighted in the Hughes-Freeland essay. Fundamentally, Maclean’s work changes the history of Highland art moving it away from the drawing room pictures of clan chiefs, hunting scenes, castles or the later beach scene images of the Colourists to foreground, instead, the people who worked on the land or at sea and their struggle for survival. But it is not just art in this representational sense that he contests: he questions the narrow confines of categorisation which distinguishes between fine art and other forms were of making. A world of boats and gear and the skills of the engineer or the stone-dyker become part of a material culture which reverberates dialogically back in time.

Maclean’s far reaching exhibition The Ring-Net at The Third Eye Centre in Glasgow in 1978 will serve as introduction to his radical re-thinking of what constitutes an art form. The Ring-Net is a collection of drawings, photographs and printed plans, numbering more than 340 items described by Richard

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Demarco as “a work of scientific investigation” (Allerston, 1990, p. 13). The exhibition, first shown at The Third Eye Centre in Glasgow in 1978 has, in a number of ways, formed a template for his subsequent works. The subject of the exhibition is a particular method of herring fishing known as the Scottish Ring-Net.

Angus Martin collaborated with Maclean and his book The Ring-Net Fishermen (1981) was based on their research; his introduction begins with a short overview:

The evolution of the Scottish Ring-Net from a crude assemblage of drift-nets hauled onto the sandy beaches of lower Lochfyne in the mid-1830s, to a sophisticated deep-water method, requiring powerful motor boats and an array of electronic equipment, took 120 years to complete. Ironically, with the attainment or maximum development, a rapid decline began which, within the past decade, signifies Figure 2. Loading to Hold, The Ring Net, 1978, photograph.

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the unmistakable, and probably irreversible, end of that method of herring fishing. (Martin, 1981, p. 1)

The research was not confined to the fishermen and their methods of fishing but with the other associated industries: the design of the fishing boats, boatbuilding, engineering, sail-making, net making, curing, gutting and packing.

The scope of the project belies its original brief. Rather than tackling particular aspects of ring-netting, the artist (Maclean) concerned himself with everything, from the equipment used by the fishermen to the food they ate. He even considered their cures for salt water boils. He wrote to Martin of his determination to ensure that the documentation be exhaustive: “Nothing must escape us – from Figure 3. Loch Fyne Skiff:

The Ring Net; drawing (1978).

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the makers names of the stove and cooking pot, to the brand of tobacco that the men used in their pipes did they all have the little metal lids that my grandfather had even as an old man” (Allerston, 1990, p. 19).

Enormous care was taken throughout to check and cross check the accuracy of information in the exhibition as Maclean was acutely aware that his audience would include experienced fishermen. This explains the lengths that he went to over details like hammock lashing, the development of decks and winches, brailers, net construction, net needles and natural signs for detecting herring. Maclean was insistent that the exhibition be seen in Tarbert and Camp- beltown, the centres of research for the project: “it has to go where it will have a meaning” (Allerston, 1990, p. 54). Maclean’s sense of responsibility towards the audience of fishermen meant absolute fastidiousness in the collection and presentation of the documentary evidence. His concern is revealed again and again in his correspondence in connection with the exhibition: “no hanging nets” no “old skin buoys” but instead everything exhibited to be “defined, clean, considered, accurate” (Allerston, 1990, p. 68).

Figure 4. Herring:

The Ring Net; pen and ink drawing (1978).

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In many ways the vast scale of the project was driven by this relentless drive for documentary accuracy. The fact that he and Martin had worked as fishermen was all important to their research and their way of collecting information and assessing it, this also informed the decision about where the work was to be shown and, most importantly, their concerns about the reception of the exhibition by an informed audience of the fishing communities themselves.

The dominant features of The Ring Net need to be seen in the context of Maclean’s work as a whole: the scope and rigour of his research, his collaboration with the community as participant observer and his absolute insistence on precision throughout. The need for exacting attention to detail in Northern Maritime communities is understood in a different way from other cultures whose survival is not dependent on the sea. As we have seen in The Ring Net research, the precisionist adhering to the design of the boats, the materials used, the making of the nets, the workings of the winch, the alignment of the net, the use of the brailers all testify to the paramount importance of functionality.

This is exactly as we have seen in the Inuit priorities and practices in the North Atlantic especially in relation to the use of tools: the knife skills essential to the hunt and the needle skills essential to protection from the climate. In one memorable exhibit in Relate North 2017: Art and Design for Education and Sustainability, Rovaniemi 2017, we read the following from an unnamed Sámi informant: “Every woman has to know how to sew, otherwise she and all her family would freeze to death in the Tundra” (Usenyuk-Kravchuk, 2017). We find, in the work of Maclean, respect/reverence for the skills of the astronomer who reads the movement of the seasons by the position of the sun, the navigator who plots a course via the stars, the ship’s draughtsman who designs a vessel capable of traversing the oceans, the fisherman who manages a boat in all weathers, reads the sea for signs of herring before he aligns a net, or the structural engineer who constructs the dwelling places as protection against elements and invasions alike.

Even in Maclean’s most recent exhibition, Will Maclean: Narratives, at the Fine Arts Society, Edinburgh (April 2018), we are struck by the assem- bled and constructed nature of the work. At first glance we could be reminded of Surrealist boxes or the white, light relief works of Ben Nicholson from the

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1930s but these resonances quickly fade as we engage with the Maclean works before us. Many of the pieces contain ‘moving parts’ which look as though they are designed to fulfil a specific function. The titles – Mariners Museum: Ficti- tious Sun, Mariners Museum: Storm Plotter, Mariners Museum: Taxonomy of Tides, Navigator’s Box/Stormfinder, Science of the Bivalve, Baleen Zoomorphic, Longitudinal Section/Towards Gairloch, Impossible Alignments – testify to the mathematical/scientific dimension to the exhibition.

Formality and precision are the distinguishing features of Maclean’s approach

Figure 5. Simpson’s Tail Brailer: The Ring Net;

drawing (1978).

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reminding us of the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig admonishing Magnus Magnusson in interview for casting up the issue of his lack of that wilder Gaelic mode. MacCaig replied, “I don’t know what you mean by the wilder Gaelic mode

… the Gaelic mode is very formal, classical and contained in all the modes of art:

poetry, sculpture, you name it” (Alexander, 1977). This point is reinforced by Alasdair Macrae’s reference to MacCaig’s predilection for “authorial impersonality

and an esteem for intricate formal patterns” (Macrae, 2010, p. 25).

When we remember Wilhelm Worringer’s seminal paper written in 1908 we realise that the opposing tendencies which he recognised in the arts of different peoples is still an essential key to the understanding of works of art today:

Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy panthe- istic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world;

in a religious respect it corresponds to a strongly transcendent tinge Figure 6. Impossible

Alignments; found objects, sculpture, (2018).

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to all notions. We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space. (Worringer, 1997[1908], p. 15)

And then later:

… the highest abstraction, most strict in its exclusion of life, is peculiar to the peoples at their most primitive cultural level. A causal connection must therefore exist between primitive culture and the highest, purest regular art form. And the further proposition may be stated: The less mankind has succeeded, by virtue of its spiritual cognition, in entering into a relation of friendly confidence with the appearance of the outer world, the more forceful is the dynamic that leads to the striving after this highest abstract beauty. (Worringer, 1997[1908], p. 17)

Maclean’s boxed artworks are full of mystery but they are also formal, exact and highly wrought. They appear to us as intricate pieces which have been designed and finished in a boatbuilder’s yard or an engineer’s workshop.

The Lithuanian poet Cselaw Milosz acknowledged the same opposition, defined above by Worringer, in the poem addressed to Robinson Jeffers who he refers to as ‘a Scotch-Irish wanderer’:

And you are from surf-rattled skerries. From the heaths where burying a warrior they broke his bones

so he could not haunt the living. From the sea night

which your forefathers pulled over themselves, without a word.

Above your head no face, neither the sun’s nor the moon’s, only the throbbing of galaxies, the immutable

violence of new beginnings, of new destruction.

All your life listening to the ocean.

(Milosz, 2006, p. 74)

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Milosz finds in Jeffers’s poetry a divergent, alien aesthetic which can only be explained in the way that Worringer identifies above. He identifies that sense in the “Scotch-Irish wanderer” of a world of “surf-rattled skerries” and “the throbbing of galaxies”; a world that is menacing, destructive, chaotic.

Maclean’s work manifests, as a distinctive feature, a formal precision, a geometric clarity and a scientific aspect. These elements are characteristic of a people whose relationship with the external world is one of strife – they represent the need for an art which opposes that world of strife, an art of order, of geometric accuracy. Maclean’s art reveals, above all, a respect for the culture to which he belongs where the struggle for survival in more recent times has involved not just the sense of strife in relation to the natural elements but to human forces of oppression likewise.

Something of Maclean’s response to landlord oppression is found in the land sculpture construction An Sùileachan (2013) designed collaboratively by Maclean and Marian Leven and situated at Reef on the West Coast of the Island of Lewis.

Figure 7. An Sùileachan;

stone, granite, iron and wood (2013). Photo: Dr.

Colin Macdonald.

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Before attending to the significant historical and political background to the piece, I wish to draw attention to its formal properties. The working drawings and the list of source materials is a study in itself but it is the kind of mathematical precision as seen in all of Maclean’s work that characterises the thrust of the enquiry. As detected in Worringer, above, it is the need to find an abstract form that will order the desperate struggles of a people against the powerful antithetical forces that they encounter. The visual statements of Maclean and Leven testify to their determination to find a solution, a control of space by formal means that characterises this remarkable land sculpture piece.

From the illustration of Robert Morris Observatory (1970) showing Maclean and Leven’s debt to printed sources, to the research for the beacon and its projected alignment to the design of the Raider’s circle and the workings of the stone arch, the source material and archival record is meticulous.

Figure 8. Iron Beacon: source material An Sùileachan (2013).

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Figure 9. Plan Reef:

source material for An Sùileachan (2013).

Figure 10. Arch:

source material for An Sùileachan (2013).

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The sense of the geometric/constructed formal enclosure of form as an oppositional force in its equilibrium to the injustices of history is communicated, is felt, is ‘presenced’.

An Sùileachan was created by Maclean and Leven following a trip that the artists had taken to St Kilda, the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Something of the Northern elemental quality of people’s lives in these islands informs the metaphysical aura of the structure. In terms of the specifics of the forms, the distinctive doorway speaks of the Inuit tupqujaq, a large structure through which a shaman might enter the spirit world, and the two circular chambers of earlier research by the artists on the Pictish double-disc markings were revealed during the excavation of the East Wemyss caves in Fife.

An Sùileachan is dedicated to the Lewis people of the 19th century who were cleared from their land and to the 20th century Land Raiders of Reef. The eastern circle is inscribed with the names of the Reef Raiders. It is also dedicated to the recent Land Reforms and to the creation of the Bhaltos Community Trust.

As such, it examines the notion of the counter-narrative from the perspective of the dispossessed. It is a piece of Participatory Art. The raw unworked stone which comprises the structure is shaped into the passageway and chambers. They were lumps of stone, broken from the mountain originally, and then shaped into the houses and walls of Uig. The stonemason who built the walls, Ian Smith, gathered together the elements donated by the crofters. The massive stones for the archway, discovered by Jim Crawford another stonemason and historian, were located around the low water mark on Vuia Beag, an island in West Loch Roag close to the Bhaltos Peninsula. The wood came from the old trees in the grounds of Stornoway Castle; local woodworker John Angus MacLeod made the seating. The brazier was forged by blacksmith John MacLeod of Stornoway from old graveyard railings. The artwork reflects far more than the perceptions of two individuals – that is, the artists Maclean and Leven. An Sùileachan works, instead, politically to engage the people of Lewis in a dialogical relationship with their histories.

In order to fully appreciate the nature of the challenge that An Sùileachan sets down before its audience, we need to explore the notion of response. As indi-

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cated above in relation to Structuralism (and for that matter, Post-Structuralism) almost all models for responses to art make recourse to reading strategies of one kind or another based on hermeneutics. However, this is not the kind of response that is demanded at An Sùileachan – whilst the historical allusions and the formal sculptural language of the piece are of enormous academic interest, one’s first reaction at the site will be sensuous rather than intellectual. We are struck by a feeling of awe at the site, of something akin to wonder, as we assimi- late the material presence of the sculpted stone and the air that surrounds it.

It is a stunning example of art as ‘affect’. This idea of ‘affect’ is one developed primarily by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Simon O’Sullivan has devoted a book length study to a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘affect’ and he describes the way that “affect is thought in two ways: as the affect of art on the body and as that which constitutes the art object. In both cases affect is oriented against an overemphasis on signifying regimes, but also habit and opinion”

(Lyotard, 1988, p. 6). There is a problem with the reading of the cultural object in art historical or anthropological terms in that as we strive to understand its meanings, we become fixated on the object as an object of knowledge. The search for meaning within art – the hermeneutics of art – can have exactly the opposite effect to that intended: that is by subsuming the work under the aegis of knowledge or understanding it can be made into something recognizable and its power to startle is diminished in direct proportion to its comprehensibility.

Perhaps it is Lyotard who most succinctly identifies the way of sensing or mindset that allows us to become receptive:

to become open to the ‘It happens that’ rather than the ‘What happens’, requires at the very least a high degree of refinement in the perception of small differences...The secret of such ascesis lies in the power to be able to endure occurrences as ‘directly’ as possible without the mediation of a ‘pre-text’. Thus to encounter the event is like bordering on nothingness. (Lyotard, 1988, p. 18)

At the beginning of this paper, we questioned the tenets of a too narrow binary Postcolonialism and the increasing need for a more inclusive paradigm to interrogate peripheral and semi-peripheral Modernisms. We have seen the ways that an anthropological approach can bring us to a renewed awareness

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of the sensuous – the encounter with An Sùileachan, in particular, is first and foremost a physical one. We have seen that a purely hermeneutic approach can blind us to what is in front of our eyes as we search for inner meaning. However, it is also clear that whilst the sensuous is a starting point, it has to be allied to the interpretation of a code. The surface textures of the stone at An Sùileachan or the technical features of The Ring Net are ways to draw us into a dialogue – they represent innovative ways to open our eyes so that we might re-enter the other country of our pasts without the ‘assistance’ of a ‘grand narrative’ to guide us. As we have seen above in the discussion on Postmodernism, the surface similarities between Maclean’s work and the most renowned of the Postmodern- ists is misleading. The probing to the historical narrative, the ‘mutations from below’, remains the central task of interpretation – we have to analyse the formal elements which are used to redress the injustices of the past by giving voice to those whose voices were not heard. In order to understand the formal features of the peripheral and semi-peripheral Modernisms we have to investigate further the specific forces – social and political – which provoked them. Through a focus on two of Maclean’s artistic collaborations/interventions above – with Martin and the fishing community of Kintyre and with Leven and the crofting/coastal community of Reef – we have begun a dialogue about the vital role that art on the edge can play to help us reconfigure our historical ontologies.

References

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Allerston, P. (1990, May). The ring net by Will Maclean (Unpublished MLitt dissertation).

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Foucault, M. (1986[1970]). The order of things: An archeology of the human sciences.

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Maclean, W. (2011). Will Maclean: Collected works 1970–2010. London: The Fleming- Wyfold Art Foundation.

Macrae, A. (2010). Norman MacCaig. Tavistock: Northcote.

Martin, A. (1981). The ring-net fishermen. Edinburgh: John Donald.

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Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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MIT Press.

Usenyuk-Kravchuk, S. (2017) Visual Explorations into the World of Arctic Nomads: The Everyday World of a Nomadic Woman: Needlework. In M. Huhmarniemi (Ed.), Re- late North 2017: Art and Design for Education and Sustainability (p. 23). Rovaniemi, Finland: University of Lapland.

Woods, A. (1987). Will Maclean. In C. Runkel (Ed.), Will Maclean: Sculptures and box constructions 1974–87 (pp. 5–11). London: Claus Runkel Fine Art.

Worringer, W. (1997[1908]). Abstraction and empathy: A contribution to the psychology of style. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks.

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Arctic Design for a Sustainable, Technological Future

Jonna Häkkilä and Milla Johansson

University of Lapland, Finland

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I

n this chapter, we describe the design approach taken in two exhibitions, Kaiku (2016) and Vaana (2017), exhibited at Milan Design Week, Ventura Lambrate, by the University of Lapland. The two exhibitions combine an Arctic Design approach with visions for a sustainable and human-centric technology future. Arctic Design reflects the profile of the University of Lapland, Faculty of Art and Design. Situated at the Arctic Circle in Finland, Northern nature and culture are an integral part of the design context. Sustainability and respect for the fragile Arctic nature is at the core of Arctic Design. The inspiration for design is often sought from the Arctic nature, and is visible in both the materials used and the simple and pure forms of the design products. Sustain- ability is reflected in the use of natural materials and designing long-lasting, functional artifacts, where the aesthetics are found in the distinctive and purposeful style of the design. Wood, reindeer leather, snow and ice are materials with both traditional and contemporary applications. However, Arctic Design does not only build on tradition, but combines it with future visions.

The interactive experiences of Kaiku and Vaana aimed to provide glimpses of the purity and serene beauty of the Arctic to the exhibition visitors, with a twist of the modern. In this chapter, we suggest how high-end technology can be integrated with design.

In this chapter, the term Arctic Design is used in a wide sense to cover different design approaches that have a linkage with the Arctic aspects, whether it is through the context, materials, message, or some other aspect. The work for the Kaiku and Vaana exhibitions has been conducted in collaboration with the students and the research programme The Naked Approach – Nordic perspec- tive to gadget-free hyperconnected environments funded by Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, demonstrating the close collaboration between the research institutes and the Faculty of Art and Design. The exhibitions form interactive spaces, where the visitors can touch and interact with the exhibition pieces. Whilst technology was used to create the interactive experiences, it was hidden in the exhibited objects and the technical components were embedded as part of the artifacts. Together, the interactive experiences were designed to communicate the fragility and beauty of the north, as well as demonstrate how

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the technology can be integrated in future artifacts in a calm and aesthetic manner. The exhibition pieces also envision how technology can contribute towards a more sustainable future.

This chapter contributes to the academic discussion on Arctic Design, which has only just begun (Tahkokallio, 2012). The chapter provides insights on how design can combine and communicate visions of sustainable future, it also showcases examples where Arctic Design meets technology. In the next section, we discuss the design context; relevant technology trends, and introduce different dimensions of Arctic Design. We then bind these two themes together by introducing how they meet in two design exhibitions, Kaiku and Vaana, and present selected exhibition pieces in more detail.

The Design Context

In the constantly changing world, the recent decades have demonstrated an increasingly fast development in technology as well as socio-economical changes, which have a great impact on our future. Trends such as global warming, increasing population, urbanization and the socio-economic challenges of consumer society have created ecological risks, which greatly affect the ecology and future of the entire planet. Sustainability has been recognized as a key challenge, which needs to be addressed with a wide spectrum of solutions across the society. The increasing awareness of the ecological challenges has directed more attention towards Arctic topics and increased the general interest in the Nordic area. In these discussions, the fragile nature of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions is highlighted, as they are especially sensitive to environmental changes.

However, there are positive developments which can be harnessed for a better tomorrow. These developments can roughly be divided in two catego- ries, which both are important and contribute to positive change for a more sustainable future: awareness and attitudes for behavior change and technological advances that will help to overcome a versatility of challenges. The two exhibitions presented in this chapter target both of the goals (increased awareness and technological advances). Firstly, the exhibitions presented here

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highlight the special characteristic of northern environments and engage the visitors with topics relevant to the north and sustainability. This increases the general awareness for caring for the nature. Secondly, the exhibition pieces use new technologies combined with design, providing visions of more sustainable world and the roles that new technologies can play in it.

The design of interactive artifacts touches the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and brings together two different disciplines; computer science and product design. These two fields meet at the cross-section of interaction design, which is at the core of HCI, and which defines how the interactive systems are manipulated by the user and the kind of output that results. The outcomes aim to provide inspiring and interesting user experiences, where holistic design approach combines both utilitarian and hedonic aspects (Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006). From the interaction design point of view, the physical artifacts in the exhibition need to be usable and reliable, yet at the same time inspiring and aesthetic. To understand the background to the interaction design in the exhibition as well as the technologies used, we next address these topics.

Towards Calm and Sustainable Ubiquitous Computing

Computing in its different forms has emerged in (virtually) all fields of our everyday life. Interaction with smart phones, tablets, and different types of media gadgets are embedded in our (urban) lifestyle. Due to the technology miniaturization and decreased manufacturing costs, the trend of embedding smart computing modules into different products and everyday objects has gained speed. Smart watches, activity bracelets and home automation systems are commonly used today and represent examples of the world getting ‘smarter’.

The term ‘ubiquitous computing’ is used to refer to the approach, where sensors and other computing modules are embedded into our surroundings and where the world around us can detect, infer and respond to our actions and needs.

The vision of ubiquitous computing was presented by Mark Weiser in his seminal paper ‘The computing for 21^st century’, which became a driving

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vision for the research community (Weiser, 1991). In this vision, Weiser painted a world where the technology is so entwined with our surroundings, that it disappears into the background and so goes unnoticed by the user. The technical future is envisioned to be calm and the operations happening without distracting or loading the people (Weiser & Brown, 1997). When looking at the world today, we are still far from that vision, with different screens, displays and devices fighting of our attention.

Research on ubiquitous computing has been quite technology driven, first focusing on creating the technical functionality and making them feasible enough to be applied further. As the focus has been on developing the technology to enable new products, there has been less attention devoted to the user experience design and user centric approach (Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Olsson, & Häkkilä, 2015). Now that the technology has matured and, for example, accessible prototyping kits have been developed, there are better opportunities to explore the possibilities for design. Our design pieces apply different approaches that extend over the conventional solutions of interactive technology: tangible interactions, new materials, modular and adap- tive computing units, and energy harvesting technologies. These elements contribute towards looking at the technology future from a different angle.

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) are User Interfaces (UIs), where the physical form factor is touched and handled for input in an interactive system.

Tangible UIs go beyond conventional mouse and keyboard type user interfaces and are promoted, for example, in designing aesthetic and experience rich interactive systems, as well as a more intuitive way to interact with computers (Ishii, 2008). The physical nature of the user interface, its shape and materials, provide opportunities for designing expressions and mediate emotions, factors that conventional computing interfaces are criticized for (Hornecker, 2011).

With tangible UIs, materiality plays a central role. The experience with materials is not only limited to haptic feedback and touch sensation, but materials also affect to the visual design and the style. With material selections, the designer can promote values and create associations, as for instance investi- gated by Häkkilä, He and Colley (2015) for natural materials. Tangible user

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interfaces can utilize, for instance, wood or water as an interactive element, and thus emphasize the connection with nature. The tangible sensation can be used to create memorable and surprising user experiences and especially water has been described to intensify the experience with the system when touched (Pier

& Goldberg, 2005; Lappalainen, Korpela, Colley, & Häkkilä, 2016).

Wearable computing is a term that covers different types of wearable form factors for interactive technologies and computing. Wearable computing includes a wide variety of different form factors, reaching from interactive garments to accessories such as jewelry, handbags as well as wrist-worn and head-mounted devices. Whereas a smartphone is today the de facto form factor for everyday mobile computing, wearable computing is estimated to be the next step in this evolution. Consumer products in the area now focus on smart watch and bracelet form factors, which have become commonplace especially in the area of wellness and activity tracking. However, the advances in material technologies, smart textiles and component integration, sensors and other electronic components are making their way into clothes (Häkkilä, 2017). As an output, wearables typically employ screens, single LEDs, or shape-changing (Schneegass, Olsson, Mayer, & Laerhoven, 2016). The concepts presented in the research domain have so far focused more on explicit information visualization rather than ambient displays for example, in a shirt-integrated information display for fellow joggers (Mauriello, Gubbels, & Froehlich, 2014). In addition, wearable computing opens up new perspectives from the sustainability point of view. For instance, the possibilities to use organic materials, waste and recy- cling aspects are areas that need further research.

Printed electronics is an area with a huge potential impact on manufac- turing of consumer electronics. In printed electronics, the components and their wiring is printed on a flexible surface, such as paper. The ability to use standard roll-to-roll printing technologies enables low cost mass production and the area is under a vast development both in terms of the materials, such as inks and manufacturing processes. For sustainable technologies an especially interesting area is utilizing a printed electronic approach to manufacture solar cells. With computing becoming ubiquitous, energy consumption is an

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important aspect to take into account. Energy harvesting techniques can be used to power distributed or mobile computing units and solar cells offer a clean energy option. Functional printed electronics solar cells have already been demonstrated, and they offer great potential for the future (Välimäki, Jansson, Korhonen, Peltoniemi & Rousu, 2017).

Arctic Design as a Possibility for Designers

With Arctic Design, the design process itself can be quite conventional and universal, as explained in classic textbooks (Ulrich & Eppinger, 2016). Never- theless, the context of the Arctic is unique in the process. As pointed out by Miettinen, Laivamaa and Alhonsuo (2014), the Arctic environment and conditions create special challenges and needs for product and service design. It demands expertise and understanding to apply the specific Arctic qualities to the design. Therefore, the Arctic viewpoint is researched widely at the Univer- sity of Lapland and is part of its strategic profile. The university’s vision is to create and to be recognized for, an international profile as an Arctic and Northern university of science and art (University of Lapland, 2018).

The Arctic environment works as an extraordinary source of inspiration.

Traditionally Finnish designers have sought creativity from Lapland. One iconic example is designer Tapio Wirkkala´s glassware Ultima Thule, designed in the 1960´s, inspired by the melting ice. Furthermore, designers today use Arctic nature as a source of inspiration, since the natural surroundings are easily accessible and omnipresent. Designer Maija Puoskari was inspired by a peaceful view at her annual vacation spot in Lapland: the mountain Saana and the lake Kilpisjärvi. She captured the views in a mirror Tyyni, designed with Tuukka Tujula in 2015.

In Arctic Design, the connection with nature is almost instinctive; the materials used in design are preferably from nearby and sustainable sources, since the impact to environment is so evident. The principles for sustainable material selection often include aspects such as production methods, functionality, user preferences, design, price, environmental impact and lifetime of products

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(Ljungberg, 2007). Genuine material qualities are often utilized and emphasized.

Consequently, the design is affected by the choice of sustainable material.

The Arctic environment with its dark winters, cold temperatures and masses of snow and ice brings particular challenges to design, but is also an enabler. For instance, frozen lakes can be used as ice roads and dinner acquired with ice fishing. Skiing and ice-hole swimming are common cultural activities.

Testing for harsh conditions is included in the Arctic product design process, in addition to the expertise in material and mechanical engineering (Miettinen, Laivamaa, & Alhonsuo, 2014). The harsh conditions work as an exceptional platform for product testing, and are utilized e.g. by the automotive industry.

In addition, the culture of Arctic areas is a valuable asset for creativity. It is specifically important and emphasized in Arctic Design to respect the native culture. Therefore, as well as a sensitive and fragile ecology, the Arctic areas are also dealing with very sensitive cultural issues (Hardt, 2012). Even if tradi- tions serve as a source for inspiration, current Arctic Design is created for the future. The beauty of the Arctic can be found both in its wild nature and in its urban environments. The Arctic is not just ice and snow, midnight sun and mosquitos. It is also a way of living and thinking, embedded in the mindset and practices of people living in the North. To deal with the conditions and to enable comfortable living, it is common to use specifically designed products, such as window blinds to block the sunlight in the summer night, or winter tires for bicycles to continue riding in the snow. Restaurants and hotels made of snow and ice have become common tourist attractions.

There are vast design possibilities if seen from the Arctic perspective and Arctic Design as a concept has potential for the future. Distinctive design is remarkable in this time, when information is distributed real-time from anywhere to anyone, and globally designs can easily resemble each other.

However, as expressed by Härkönen and Vuontisjärvi (2017) the definition of local becomes challenging as people move and travel more regularly. Thus, it is important that the specific qualities of Arctic Design are maintained, emphasized and respected.

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Arctic Design Exhibited – Vaana and Kaiku

THE EXHIBITIONS

In the following sections, we present two exhibitions focusing on Arctic Design, Kaiku and Vaana. From the outset, a specific theme around Arctic Design was developed to be applied in Kaiku (‘echo’ in Finnish) and Vaana (‘sparseness’

in Northern Sámi). A multidisciplinary group of design students created the frame for the exhibition pieces, also reflecting the overall theme.

In Kaiku, the exhibition theme was to look at the Arctic beauty and everyday life in the North from a specific angle (Figure 1). People living in the Arctic area are an integral part of the environment. People´s actions effect the fragile environment, as according to the Finnish saying, “when you shout in the forest, the same echo returns”. This philosophy offered inspiration to create natural, fluent, and enabling design pieces that at the same time addressed the call for sustainability related to the Arctic.

In Vaana, the exhibition theme was to combine views on scarcity and minimalism in the Arctic (Figure 2). Inspiration for this interactive exhibition was the light and its significance in the Arctic environment. The design was driven by the experience of the long dark polar night. The Arctic winter intensifies the forms of the surroundings. In the time of the darkness, even the dimmest colours seem bright and inspiration is sought from the tiniest details.

Both exhibitions had a strong emphasis on interactivity and User Experi- ence (UX) design, enabled with technology. With the exhibition pieces, interacting with the design pieces using your body and gestures gave a stimulating experience. The visitor was not only an observer, but also an interactive partici- pator at the exhibition. With active participation, the connection with the context became more powerful. Authenticity and the seamless integration of raw and refined materials provided holistic experiences, which were emphasized when interacting with the products. The exhibition pieces combined the knowledge of the Arctic, design and technical skills and were a showcase of multidisciplinary design collaboration. The exhibitions introduced the aspects of sustainability in the materials, technology and topics. Sustainable design

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was present not only in the materials, but also in the manner the exhibition was constructed. The ability to move the exhibition fluently from one place to another and to recycle the construction materials supported this ideology.

The interactive spaces of the exhibitions were created in collaboration with The Naked Approach research project (2014–2018). The Naked Approach project

Figure 1. Kaiku at Milan Design Week. Photo: Milla Johansson, 2016.

Figure 2. Vaana at Milan Design Week. Photo:

Vaana-project/Teppo Vertomaa, 2017.